Originally posted internally 15 Jul 2016:

This is something I’ve been meaning to do since TechCom, so it’s a little overdue. My intention going forward is to have a monthly cadence.

Since I have some involvement in build, sell, deliver I’ll organise along those lines:

Build

‘Modern Platform’ is due before the Technical Design Council (TDC) next week, which will be the culmination of months of work with our partners. The intention is to have a basis for all of our offerings (cloud, workplace, big data and analytics, and the platform itself) that can start small (and cheap) and scale well. Our original target was to be able to do a 100 Virtual Machine (VM) minimum footprint at $1200 per VM, we’ve not quite hit the low end on scale – it’s 150 VMs, but we’ve exceeded the price objective as they come in at $800/VM (so arguably the target is hit – it just comes with spare capacity). This is going to get us into smaller accounts that we couldn’t reach before, but also allows us to start small and scale up in larger opportunities.

Some good progress has been made in our open source efforts around our offerings with the release of AWS and Azure adapters for Agility and also a Terraform plugin. Coming soon will be adapters for Kubernetes and AWS CloudFormation. Open Sourcing these things allows our customers to engage without having to ask permission, and creates an opportunity for co-creation with a community of customers forming around our offerings.

Sell

The first version of our Key Transformation Shift (KTS) documents (aka Digital Shifts) happened at the end of last year. Since TechCom the team has been busy revising all of the documents with the main emphasis being on highlighting the interlock between each shift, and also the interlock to cyber. The version 2 documents are now in the final stages of review before publication, and there will be a big marketing push around the Digital Shifts starting in September. Along the way there will be Town Halls for each of the shifts. The Integrated Digital Services Management (IDSM) Town Hall happened already, but if you missed it then catch up with the recording on YouTube.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been pulled into a number of pursuits, ranging from a services company in Helsinki to a comms provider in London. They’re all very interesting, and each presents its own challenges. The biggest issue however seems to be (as SJ put it) ‘if only CSC knew what CSC knows’. The digital shifts and offerings are all great, but sometimes our sales force needs stuff that’s easier to digest for customers, and we can all help make that easier to come by.

Deliver

The big news in delivery is the roll out of the new GIS organisational structure and operating model (to align with build, sell, deliver). In particular the Offering Delivery Function (ODF) is taking shape under JH’s leadership. The formation of the Operations Engineering (OE) group has been keeping PF and I busy, but the new OE lead will be starting next month. OE will bring together automation skills from the Automation Centre of Excellence (ACoE) and data skills from Governance Analytics Metrics and Business Intelligence (GAMBI) along with a team of data scientists that we’re recruiting to replace the services we’ve been getting from CKM Advisors with an organic capability.

As we shift our delivery to a more infrastructure as code based model it means that ops people need to get (or sharpen up) dev skills – using source code management, configuration management and continuous integration tools. To that end we’ve created the Infrastructure as Code boot camp, which is an instructor facilitated workshop aimed at POD staff (and GIS managers). I’ve personally been getting around the UK PODs, though I was very pleased to see DE and MH running a second generation course in Chorley and then CN volunteering to run a third generation course – that’s how it’s supposed to work so that we can get scale across the organisation. Meanwhile CK has been busy getting around US PODs, and is now part way through a tour around APAC visiting the PODs there. If you’re in India watch out for him at a POD near you next week.

Retrospective

Sadly I didn’t get into a regular cadence for these newsletters as other commitments got in the way of writing time.

I ended up taking on the x86 and Distributed Compute P&L as Offering General Manager, which allowed me to shepherd Modern Platform through the Platform Lifecycle Management (PLM) process to early release. It was very gratifying to see VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger talking about one of the first Modern Platform deployments in his Dell EMC World keynote last week; and the ‘turnkey on day 1’ mantra has become a big part of what I’m working on between build and deliver in the new organisation.

The Agility adapters for Kubernetes and Cloud Formation were released, and I noted an improvement in the quality of README.md documents where I wasn’t having to do a pull request against every one before we switched the repo from private to public.

The second set of digital shifts papers were published, with much better integration between each of them, and a cyber/security thread running through them all. They’re now undergoing another revision to align with the new DXC Technology offering families, and with a bunch of new in job CTOs holding the pen.

We replaced the offering delivery function (ODF) with offering delivery and transformation (OD&T) as we became DXC Technology, but the general direction remains the same. Similarly operations engineering (OE) became operations engineering and excellence (OE&E).

I ran the last infrastructure as code boot camp in the old workshop format in the Vilnius POD in the final week of CSC, and tried the new Katacoda based approach on attendees there. The whole workshop has now been migrated to Katacoda to improve reach and scale, and I hope to have everybody in delivery (and elsewhere in the company) complete basic courses in collaborative source control, config management and CI/CD (managers included – the EVP for Global Delivery made his first pull request whilst running through a Katacoda scenario a few days ago).